


Off to NAN's Housing We Go

by tuesday



Category: Rotkäppchen | Little Red Riding Hood (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, F/M, Other, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 04:31:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17073518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuesday/pseuds/tuesday
Summary: A Little Red Riding Hood sci-fi AU.-NAN was located in the most inconvenient place a human could possibly reach.  Every time Red had to go out there to perform maintenance, it was an ordeal."It's a milk run," said Akako, whocouldsay that because she didn't have to do it and instead got to stay in the habitat year-round."Maybe a grocery run," said Pula, who never traveled further than the next hab over and also had no real idea of just how much trouble the whole thing was."Tell Grandmother hi for me," said Ruĝa, who was smiling with the full-faced glee of someone who had successfully and permanently foisted their responsibility off on another.





	Off to NAN's Housing We Go

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kurage_hime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kurage_hime/gifts).



> Thank you so much to meatball42 for all your help!

NAN was located in the most inconvenient place a human could possibly reach. Every time Red had to go out there to perform maintenance, it was an ordeal.

"It's a milk run," said Akako, who _could_ say that because she didn't have to do it and instead got to stay in the habitat year-round.

"Maybe a grocery run," said Pula, who never traveled further than the next hab over and also had no real idea of just how much trouble the whole thing was.

"Tell Grandmother hi for me," said Ruĝa, who was smiling with the full-faced glee of someone who had successfully and permanently foisted their responsibility off on another. It wasn't like the missing limbs had slowed her down. If anything, she was probably faster on her cyborg legs.

"You can all suck eggs," Red announced with all the gravity of one who was being sent to die.

"What does that even mean?" Pula asked.

Red left them arguing etymology, because they were all geeks and this was the worst habitat she'd ever been posted to. She didn't look back. She didn't wish she had the time to correct their, frankly, egregiously wrong assumptions. _She was not sexually propositioning them._

Red got suited up. She stepped outside to face her death or inevitable maiming. It was fine. Everything was fine.

—

NAN was housed in the center of a forest of sharp stone spires located a five kilometer trek from the hab. Once the outer edge of the forest was reached, the electronic interference started. The rover's map mode shut down. Hover mode disabled itself. Anything bigger than the one-person vehicle wouldn't fit the tight twists and turns required by the safest known route, but Red really wanted a tank.

Then again, someone bringing a tank once was why NAN had uprooted itself and moved to the stone spire forest and engaged all its defenses years before Red was born.

Red was coming up on one of her least favorite parts of those defenses right now—or on a bad day, when she let it get under her skin, her very favorite. The comm pinged insistently. She watched as the worst of the hunter programs, a BBW NAN had salvaged from somewhere and which had repaid NAN’s kindness by later savaging one of its engineers, wriggled its wolfish robot body out from under a pile of rocks and loped up next to her vehicle. She knew it was the worst one even before spotting the ears or tail, because it actually interacted with her, rather than briefly acknowledging her forest-authorized and NAN-approved RFID before settling back down. The hunter program hopped on top of the canopy until Red brought the vehicle to a halt, then clacked its claws against the window. It smiled in something that approached a friendly manner—and bypassed it entirely.

Red sighed and tried not to be charmed. It looked more and more like this was going to be a bad day. She activated the comm as she gave its glowing eyes her most unimpressed glare. It was good work. It had once convinced Pula to fess up for wrongs Akako had actually done. "What?"

"Little Red, little Red, won't you let me come in?"

"You're not that kind of wolf, and implying I'm a pig is not going to convince me to do anything but try to run you over again."

"Aw, don't be like that," the glitching hunter program said. "We're friends, aren't we?"

"Would being friends keep you from trying to eat my legs?"

"Yes."

"That's what you said to Ruĝa."

"And did I _eat_ her legs?"

"No."

"There, you see—"

"Because you are physically incapable of digestion."

The first time she'd run across this particular hunter program, its robot body had had dried blood, brown and flaking, smeared like rust in its teeth. Red had never been any under illusions about the weird and disturbing directions its faulty learning subroutines had taken it, only sometimes that it seemed to be fond of her. NAN had grown strange in its dotage, insisting on visits every month whether or not it actually needed the maintenance, but the worst it had ever done was try to feed the humans under its care dusty rocks it claimed were cookies that had gone a little stale. It had certainly never taken someone getting lost and getting out of their vehicle as an excuse to try to swallow them whole. There were other hunter programs lurking about—Ruĝa had been rescued by one—but they had the sense to leave the engineers alone.

"Come on," Red said. "Get off my roof."

"You could come out here and make me."

Red drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, wondering how long this battle of wills would take her. She'd brought supplies—once, she'd had to spend an uncomfortable eight hours trapped in one of the tunnels as the BBW draped itself over the rover's hood and whined about her actually hitting it with the rover despite her repeated verbal warnings she would do just that—but that didn't mean she was prepared. There was no preparing for this. Red was a pushover, and the BBW had built itself not-quite-literal puppy eyes, bright red, but just as effective. "I really couldn't."

"What if I said I've changed? I'm a new man now."

"You're not even a man."

"I am in all the ways that count." The BBW winked one glowing red eye.

"Does NAN know you're modifying your chassis again?"

"What could I give you," the BBW asked in a way that took a shot in the dark at seductive and landed on creepy, "to keep that under your hat?"

"You could get out of my way." Then, regretting it even as she said it, as she did every time, "but first, you could explain what 'under your hat' means."

The robot's tail began to wag.

—

When Red made it to NAN's housing, it was starting to get dark. If NAN were a regular neural augmentation network with integrated AI, its casing would be just big enough to house and protect its circuits. Because NAN was an old and buggy program that had gained a life of its own over the years (and birthed several more), the housing was instead constructed like some strange, demented idea of a cottage. There was a stoop made of a slab of metal that used to be a memorial, the names only partially legible. There was a door made of dirty and torn plastic sheeting raided from a construction site years ago. There was a room that should have held the actual casing, surrounded by newer plastic sheeting, probably also stolen, that NAN had insisted were bed curtains. The plastic sheeting was there, but that was not NAN's casing in the center of the room.

"Come in, dear," said a creaky electronic voice from the middle of NAN's "bed."

"Yeah, no." Red turned on her heel and made her way back toward her vehicle.

"Oh, come on!" The voice was loud now, explosively energetic, and the BBW swept her off her feet before she could make it to the front stoop. "I had the voice down! I copied that information perfectly. There's no way you could know I'm not NAN."

"What big eyes you have," Red said flatly, sitting up and shuffling awkwardly back a whole arms-length away.

The BBW preened. "Thank you. I use them for seeing."

"NAN doesn't have eyes." The BBW's body slumped. It was getting better at body language every day. "Or a tail. Or _teeth_."

The BBW perked back up. "Actually—!"

"Or if she does, I haven't seen them and I don't want to," Red said hurriedly before she could be disabused of her deeply cherished illusions. Her monthly maintenance obligations did not involve anything with teeth, and she would allow no one to tell her otherwise. "Where's NAN?"

"She moved into Trash Mountain again. She'll probably be back a week from now, larger, angrier, and with twelve more arms."

Red shuddered.

"But enough about her! If she's gone, you can perform maintenance with me!"

"On you," Red said.

The BBW's smile widened. "Whichever. I'm not picky."

Red put her face in her hands. "What do you think maintenance means?"

"You—you know, you stick your soft human hands everywhere and—do _things_ to the parts." The BBW was unfortunately earnest. "I promise, if you won't let me inside you, I really am happy with the reverse."

Red would be a lot more comfortable if it had stuck with wanting to eat her. She sighed. "Yeah, okay. But we're not calling it maintenance."

"What would you call it?" the hunter program (the _learning_ program) asked.

Red never did deal well with temptation. She closed the distance between them. "Sex."

—

"You're late," said Ruĝa.

"Did you bring cookies?" asked Pula. "I've been wanting to expand my rock collection."

"What the hell happened to your hair?" asked Akako.

"I don't want to talk about it," said Red.

Pula looked up. "Are you okay? You're limping."

"Don't want to talk about it," Red repeated.

"Oh, no." Ruĝa stared at her tablet with horror. "I just got an alert someone spotted NAN making another claim for Trash Mountain's highest peak."

"Didn't it learn from the last time?" Pula pulled out her own tablet, practically vibrating from excitement. "I hope someone has footage."

"Looks like you're off forest duty for a while." Akako patted Red's shoulder encouragingly. "It took what, three months to budge it last time? Think of all the free time you'll have."

"Yeah," Red agreed, doing her best not to look shifty. "But I should probably check back to be sure she doesn't get back early."

"Sensible," Ruĝa said, but she was still absorbed in the image of one long, spiked metal arm rising into the sky, a trash bag flag caught in its grip.

"I'm thinking once a week."

"What," Akako said.

"You're right," Red said, smiling despite herself. "Better be every day. Who knows how it would react to coming back to a home empty of its doting grandchildren."

"What," Pula said.

"Thanks for agreeing to take on my other maintenance duties so I'll have the time!"

This last got Ruĝa to look up from her screen. " _What_?"

"Gotta freshen up. You're all great, see you later!" Red said in a rush, turning for the hall door.

Behind her, an argument broke out over who was taking on which duties.

"None," Ruĝa said. "Just like I have no legs. I can't do it."

"You have been milking that for far too long! You have two perfectly good robot legs. Red may have fallen for your wiles, but we're stronger than that!"

"What does 'milking' mean?" Pula said, easily distracted as always. "Is that another sex thing?"

"I know for a fact you asked the hunter program that found you to take the other leg so you'd be even."

"You can't prove that. As far as anyone should know, I lost both legs to its angry maw and no legs or feet to a rockslide after getting lost again."

"You admitted it months ago!"

"I was drinking then. You can't trust past, drunk me."

Headed for the showers, Red didn't look back. She did, however, make a note to ask her new bot boyfriend for footage of the night in question in case she needed to make any apologies for holding the whole dismemberment thing against him on Ruĝa’s behalf. If not, maybe it would serve as the wake-up call she likely desperately needed. Either way, she felt no guilt for foisting her work off on her co-workers. She just knew that any day or even minute now they would get a call from the hab nearest Trash Mountain and try to make her go retrieve NAN. Best to enjoy the peace while it lasted.

—

Ruĝa may have asked for it, but Red's new boyfriend had still cut Ruĝa free from that rockslide with his _teeth_. The image was seared indelibly into Red's mind.

"Does this mean you don't want to have sex with me anymore?" BBW asked.

Hating herself a little, Red said, "I didn't say that."

And despite herself, flying in the face of all of Red's best intentions and worst expectations, they lived happily ever after.


End file.
